Ceylon goes beta: Red Hat’s own JVM-hosted language, Ceylon, has been declared feature-complete and released as a 1.0 beta. There’s a formal language spec, command line tools, SDK and a beta of an Eclipse based IDE for Ceylon too. Lots of language features have been added coming up to beta, including annotations, static methods, try for resources, switch statements that know strings and characters and more.

VLC 2.1 debuts: Every coder needs a video player that can handle any format. Thats my excuse anyway and here’s the newly released VLC 2.1 arriving to fill in the latest gaps in my playback capability. A new audio rendering pipeline, OpenGL ES support, new ports (Android from 2.1 to 4.3 for ARM, x86 and MIPS and iOS 5 to 7), a partial WinRT port, Microsoft Smoorth Streaming, support for VNC/rfb and remote desktop view-only modes, lots of new hardware decoding support on OS X, Android, Linux with VDPAU and Windows QuickSyncVideo. Oh yes and there’s the foundations for UltraHD support. And developers will find the code is amenable to integration with more software due to libVLC (and most of the modules) being under the LGPL2.1+.

Whois Privacy: An interesting study of whois and the identity proxies used to cover the identity of owners. Interesting in that the idea that only those with something nefarious to hide may use the obfuscating services is blown out of the water – “for example banks use privacy and proxy services almost as often as the registrants of domains used in the hosting of child sexual abuse images; and the registrants of domains used to host (legal) adult pornography use privacy and proxy services more often than most (but not all) of the different types of malicious activity that we studied”. Fixing Whois is going to be harder than we thought.

Browse like its 1992: Cern have launched [Line Mode Browser 2013], an emulation of 1992’s line mode browser, using Node.js and modern browser technology to recreate the glow green matrix of terminals of that era. You can find the code on GitHub.